Oceanic Saunas: from Sage 50 and spreadsheets to MRPeasy

Oceanic Saunas has been making saunas and steam rooms in Wolverhampton since the 1970s. Compact infrared cabins, bespoke Turkish steam rooms, wellness spaces for homes, hotels and leisure centres. Around 20 people work at the site and the business is still proudly independent.

What had not kept pace with the products was the software behind them. This is the story of how Director Sarah Jones went from an accounts package and a pile of spreadsheets to MRPeasy, with our consultant on site for the implementation.

A family business that chose to specialise

Sarah joined the family firm about twenty years ago. Back then Oceanic sold all sorts of bathroom products alongside its saunas, baths, showers, washroom accessories, the lot. She saw the market filling up and took a decision that shaped everything since.

“I saw the market saturating and made the decision to focus purely on saunas and steam rooms. That’s what we’re truly good at and what customers know us for today.”

Nearly half a century of craftsmanship, then, and a clear idea of what the company is for. The systems were another matter.

Sage 50 was an accounts package, not a production system

“We’d been using Sage 50 for forever,” Sarah told us. “But it’s basically an accounting program. It wasn’t giving us everything we needed from a sales and production point of view.”

The gaps showed up as a hundred small inefficiencies rather than one big failure. Duplicate SKUs. Materials recorded inconsistently. No visibility of what was happening on the shop floor.

“The whole SKU system was a mess. We had too many people creating them over the years. It needed a complete clean up. And because we were expanding our sauna ranges, it seemed like the right time to make everything more efficient and shift systems.”

What started as a tidy up turned into a proper modernisation of the business: product structures, workflows, even the physical layout of the site. Sarah wanted software underneath it that would help the company “tidy up, track things properly, and make the business stronger for the future.”

Growth Hub, MTC, Made Smarter, and then a trial account

Finding that software took the best part of a year. Sarah started with CW Growth Hub, the regional business support service. They pointed her to the Manufacturing Technology Centre, which in turn brought Oceanic into the Made Smarter programme, the government backed scheme that helps manufacturers adopt digital technology. “They gave us people who guided us through what to look out for and we had software demos using our live data.”

Alongside that, Sarah did her own digging and found MRPeasy. She signed up for the trial and, tellingly, checked how it looked on her phone, because her warehouse staff would mostly be using it for reporting.

“I loved it immediately. It was intuitive and had a brilliant interface. My logic was that if I find using it easy, my salespeople and the rest of the staff will too.”

The MTC could not support MRPeasy directly, so they put Sarah in touch with us. We are a UK implementation partner for MRPeasy, so this is the point where our involvement started. Our consultant went to Wolverhampton, mapped the production set up, talked to every department and made sure the system really was the right fit before anyone committed to it. It was.

Implementing in the middle of everything else

The implementation began in late 2022, and the timing could hardly have been busier. Oceanic was redesigning its whole product range, launching a new Magento 2 ecommerce website, and Sarah had two children during the same period. “It was a busy period,” she laughs. “But everything had to feed into one another to make it all work.”

Because so much was changing at once, it took about a year from the first steps to going live. That is longer than a typical MRPeasy project, and it is worth being honest about, because it shows that the software fits around the business rather than the other way round.

“Generally, there’s always been a solution with MRPeasy, and their support team is really great. The ticket system works very well. We’ve not had a single issue that didn’t get resolved in a relatively short time.”

What running the business looks like now

MRPeasy is now central to how Oceanic operates. For Sarah the biggest change is simply being able to see the whole company in one place.

“I can log in anywhere in the world and see how the business is doing. How many sales we’ve had today, what’s in production, what’s coming in, everything.”

She uses the CRM filters to watch quotation conversion rates and daily sales, things that were previously very hard to see. “It’s all there at a glance now.”

The staff took a little persuading. People who had run on spreadsheets and printouts for years do not give them up overnight. “We really had to encourage them to stop,” Sarah says. Today it is a different picture. “Some of my staff actually love the new system and almost compete to solve issues when anything comes up!”

Costing that can finally be trusted

Accurate costing was one of the things Sage could never give Oceanic. “One of our major issues with Sage was that we couldn’t cost things in sufficient detail. With MRPeasy, we can assign overheads and have the system automatically calculate product cost based on SKU configurations. I’m much more confident with it now, plus, I can do it very quickly.”

Saunas come in endless variations, so the feature Sarah rates most highly is the bill of materials with parameters. Pick the material, finish and details, and MRPeasy creates the related orders, works out cost and lead time, and raises purchase orders for anything that is missing. “It takes loads of work off the team.”

Sarah’s advice: do the homework first

Asked what she would tell another manufacturer weighing up an ERP or MRP system, Sarah does not hesitate.

“Don’t rush in. I would read everything I can on MRP and ERP systems to home in on my requirements. These systems are huge, and there’s much to look out for. For us, it was about how the software handles manufacturing orders, how data moves to the shop floor, and how operators access instructions.”

“Going through the process of learning what I needed the software to do was essential. While it took a while, it gave me the confidence to recognise good software when I saw it. MRPeasy is just nice to use, and everything you need, from CRM to production planning, is there. We’ve definitely found new efficiencies with it. MRPeasy supports the kind of manufacturing discipline we were aiming for and gives us the structure to adapt to change.”

Thinking about a similar move?

Oceanic’s project had everything a small manufacturer’s implementation tends to have: a legacy accounts package doing a job it was never built for, staff attached to their spreadsheets, and a business that could not stop trading while the change happened. If that sounds familiar, have a look at what MRPeasy does for UK manufacturers, or get in touch and we will talk it through with you before you commit to anything.